What if, in 20 years, after tourism and the arts have “saved” Fall River, the man you have to thank is Robert Correia, who left office, after one term, as perhaps Fall River’s most despised mayor?

I made some brutal fun of Correia during his one- term reign but I was never convinced he was the devil in a blue suit, as were so many people in Fall River.

Four things ended Bob Correia’s time in office.

1. Correia has no gift for public relations. The guy couldn’t sell heroin to a junkie.

2. Correia was sitting in the seat when the money ran out. He did pretty much what any mayor would have done in similar circumstances.

3. Correia was used to being state rep, a job that involves virtually NO public scrutiny. What did your state rep do today? This week? See what I mean? If you’re the mayor of Fall River, you got people watching your every twitch. Correia never got used to the constant nitpicking.

4. Correia honked off the professionals. He told Government Center employees to quit watching television in the office. He took the fire chief position out of civil service, angering government employees whose pensions depend on timely promotions and whose promotions depend largely on seniority.

People may believe that Bob Correia was kicked out of office by a grassroots movement, but what really doomed Correia was a revolt of the professionals.

But, some weekends, when my wife, Deborah, and I go out for dinner and a couple of drinks, I consider the increased number of dining choices in Fall River and I remember that it was Bob Correia who threw his administration’s weight behind a “downtown restaurant loop.”

It was Bob Correia’s administration that increased the number of liquor licenses available in the downtown area. South Main Street still ain’t Times Square but it’s a lot better than it was before Bob Correia was mayor. Correia wanted to block off South Main Street for pedestrian uses and, if he’d remained in office, that might have happened.

The arts ain’t doing too much in Fall River right now, but Correia was a loud voice in creating an “Arts Overlay District,” which may someday become the fountainhead of all arts in Fall River.

Bob Correia started the only downtown revitalization effort that has produced even a small bit of success. He’s remembered as a terrible mayor.

Ed Lambert left Fall River as he found it, with all of its problems intact, but many people remember his time in office as a kind of golden age.

I like a lot of things I’m seeing in Fall River right now, though I know that, around our little restaurant row, the jobless, heroin-drenched neighborhoods roll out for miles, dense, suffering and increasingly violent.

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I walk out of a restaurant after a good meal, happy, headed home. Just blocks way an old woman sleeps in the house she and her husband bought 40 years ago.

She’s afraid to take her trash out after dark, scared of the junkies and gang kids in her neighborhood.

Me and that old lady, we live in the same city, maybe blocks apart.

I started this column as a meditation on image and reality in Fall River.

But I’m stuck now, stuck on the thought of the old woman who cowers in her home, surrounded by the deteriorating remnants of a neighborhood that used to be filled

with factory workers and is now filled with fear.

And then there’s me, leather heels rapping the concrete sharply as I leave one of Fall River new restaurants, happy that there are more dining choices in my city.